North
Dakota: The voices of Dakota men imprisoned after the Dakota
Conflict of 1862 are finally being heard.

Clifford Canku from North Dakota State University has spent 10 years
studying letters written by those prisoners. The letters and other
documents had been stored away at the Minnesota Historical Society.
Canku has to pore over the faint handwriting with a magnifying glass
to read them.

"One letter would take about a week," said the Dakota
elder who teaches Dakota language at NDSU. Canku is one of three
lead translators on the project.

Some of the letter writers talk about the war; others describe
prison life.
"We're very cold, and they took the stove away from us," one
prisoner wrote. "It's way below zero and we're freezing. A lot of
people have died."

The letters add new details and important first-person perspective to a troubling
time in history.

"There's
a lot to be bothered by," said NDSU professor Bruce Maylath. "This has been a one-sided
story to this point. And for the first time this tells the other
side -- directly from the Dakota side. And it tells it in the
language they were most comfortable in."

The Dakota War of 1862
was an armed conflict between the U.S. and several bands
of eastern Dakota Sioux. It began in August, 1862
and ended in December with the execution of 38 Dakota in
Mankato, Minnesota.

The Dakota fought
because the U.S. violated treaties that caused severe
hunger and hardship among the Dakota. Traders with the Dakota had insisted the
U.S. pay the tribal annuities directly to them.

In mid-1862 the Dakota
demanded the annuities be paid to the tribes.
After
traders refused to provide supplies on credit under
those conditions, the Dakota
began attacking white settlers to drive them off their
lands. These battles continued for several months until
most Dakota bands surrendered to the U.S. Army.

By late December 1862,
more than 1,000 Dakota captives were jailed in Minnesota.
Some 300 were
sentenced to death. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the death
sentence of 265 men who were then sent to the Fort
McClellan prison in Iowa.

Maylath
said
some letters written by Dakota prisoners' suggest they
were being pressured to convert to Christianity.
Some writers asked about young men who disappeared from prison.

"There's speculation in the letters about perhaps the young men
disappeared because they refused to convert to Christianity," he
said. "We do know those young men were never seen again."

The letters
also reflect the prisoners' concern after Lincoln was
assassinated. The men feared they would be killed because the man
who saved them was dead.

Many prisoners have descendents who are alive today. The
translators realized this when reading the letters for the first
time.

"One of them would turn to me with a letter and say,
'Flag this one. It's by my great-great-grandfather,'" Maylath said. "And to have the
voices of the ancestors right there, visible in their own
handwriting, that was the most moving thing to me."

Canku said some letters are painful to read.
One tells how the guards would rape Dakota women who
cleaned and cooked at the prison camp.

"When they [guards] came after the women at night,
[the prisoners] didn't have
any recourse but to sing and let them know, and pray," he said,
"to let the women know 'we're leaving you in the presence of God.
Because if we were able to help we would have stopped what's going
on. But we can't.'

"When we read these letters to common everyday people, especially
the women cry and go through a tremendous amount of anguish, because
they have their own stories about what happened to their relatives
back then," Canku said. "A lot of them were killed."

Canku
said some letters are likely to be controversial. Some
may upset Dakota people because Dakota men who helped
the U.S. Army are identified.
They will also raise uncomfortable questions for historians.

"What happened? Did they have concentration camps in Minnesota? Even
today, people don't believe that," Canku said. "People died. They
were in prison. They experienced genocide. And when you talk about
these things you are going to get opposition saying, no, these
things didn't happen. But they did happen."

For Canku, the project is about telling the truth through long
silent voices which need to be heard.

"I think it's spiritually inspired by our ancestors," he said. "It's
time to do this and give the information out. I feel a tremendous
responsibility to carry this through."

Next year, 50 of the 150 letters will be published in book form with the
original Dakota language, the literal translation, and the
contemporary English explanation.

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